Bush is on track to be the first president since the Great Depression to have lost jobs under his watch.

The economy has rebounded strongly, but companies, under intense pressure to compete globally, have been holding down their costs by working employees harder instead of hiring new ones.

The United States is in the midst of an epidemic of obesity and related health problems, and fast food is bad for you.

Morgan Spurlock's attempt to demonstrate the link between these two matters, using himself as an experimental subject, represents an entertaining, and occasionally horrifying, statement of the obvious.

The larger issue of the relationship between legal consumables and public health turns on the question of responsibility. Does it rest with those of us who eat, drink and inhale the products that clog our arteries and corrode our livers and lungs, or with the companies who sell and advertise them?

Mr. Spurlock's answer, emphatically anticorporate on its surface, is perhaps more ambiguous than it seems.

Texas: not only the largest state in the union but also one of the fattest.

There is a heartbreaking moment when an overweight girl worries that she will never lose weight because she can't afford to eat two sandwiches a day from Subway.

The first source of uncertainty is the recasting of the relationship between S&T and US national security.

A second source of uncertainty is the duration, depth, and eventual effects of the current worldwide economic weakness.

A third source of uncertainty is the effect of the continuing globalization of labor markets on the US knowledge-based economy.

The dynamics of skilled labor migration in the context of changing government and industry policies are hard to predict.

A range of indicators traces a trend that shows growing competitive strength in the Asian region outside of Japan, chiefly in China, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. They have in place, or are instituting, policies and incentives to retain their highly trained personnel, attract expatriates, or otherwise benefit from their nationals working abroad, chiefly in the United States.

The United States faces a major shortage of scientists because too few Americans are entering technical fields and because international competition is heating up for bright foreigners who once filled the gap.

The solution is for the United States to work harder at developing its own scientific talent. But a board report shows declining interest among young Americans in science careers.

The board in its report noted "a troubling decline" in the number of Americans training to be scientists and said such trends "threaten the economic welfare and security of our country."

The 2004 report on indicators says the US ranks 17th among nations surveyed in the share of its 18-to-24-year-olds who earn natural science and engineering degrees.

There are signs that the United States is losing ground to foreign competitors.

Fewer and fewer young Americans seem interested in technical careers.

The administration seems misguided ...

The term "Information Revolution" is a misnomer.

All who want to succeed in this new environment must stop thinking of networks and digital technologies as media for managing information and start thinking of them as media to manage relationships.

To say that the Internet is about "information" is a bit like saying that "cooking" is about oven temperatures; it's technically accurate but fundamentally untrue.

While it is true that digital technologies have completely transformed the world of information into readily manipulable bits and bytes, it is equally true that the genuine significance of these technologies isn't rooted in the information they process and store.

A dispassionate assessment of the impact of digital technologies on popular culture, financial markets, health care, telecommunications, transportation and organizational management yields a simple observation: The biggest impact these technologies have had, and will have, is on relationships between people and between organizations.

Gutenberg's technology wasn't merely about producing compendia of information. It was about transforming traditional relationships between the People, their Church and the State. Five centuries later, the point endures: When it comes to the impact of new media, the importance of information is subordinate to the importance of community.

New kinds of relationships between networks create new kinds of relationships between people. That is the essential tension of the revolution taking place.

The irony of our so-called Information Age: Information itself offers value only when presented in the context of particular relationships.

New technologies push and test the meaning of concepts like relationship, community and interpersonal expression.

The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in critical areas of science and innovation.

Foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of the trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural life.

"We stand at a pivotal moment," said Tom Daschle.

"We are in a new world, and it's increasingly going to be dominated by countries other than the United States."

"It's unbelievable," Diana Hicks, chairwoman of the school of public policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said of Asia's growth in science and technical innovation. Dr. Hicks said that American scientists, when top journals reject their papers, usually have no idea that rising foreign competition may be to blame.

America's economy leads the world because our system of private enterprise rewards innovation. Entrepreneurs, scientists, and skilled workers create and apply the technologies that are changing our world. President Bush believes that government must work to help create a new generation of American innovation and an atmosphere where innovation thrives.

In theory, maturity means your musical tastes also get a tune-up. In reality, this may not apply if you possess an iPod.

Only now do I realise that while I have been downloading songs, I have been unloading my dignity, a song at a time. Years of buying music-snob CDs have given way to an unending string of boppy pop to accompany me around Safeway.

Maybe it's because iTunes makes it easy to binge-buy or download songs as singles. Or maybe it's simply that there's no incriminating CD jewel box to clutter my shelves.

In setting up my own Blockbusters, I was putting together a wish list of films I should watch and books I should read; a self-improving stack to stave off the faintest possibility of future boredom.